


Of Love and Lust and Silence

by StellarRequiem (orphan_account)



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Felix is such a hedonist, Floor Sex, M/M, Power top Locus, Pre-Canon, Reunion Sex, Rough Sex, arguably a character study, just y'know-with porn, lolix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2015-11-09
Packaged: 2018-04-27 09:57:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5043901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You greeted him with bruises shaped like your ceramic-plated fingertips. With your teeth sunk into his neck.<br/>____ </p><p>You could have let him keep at it that way until the two of you lost definition and became one ugly, hungry being blended together by your heartstrings, but it would have ruined all the fun.</p><p>____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________</p><p>Locus and Felix reunite on Chorus after almost a year of separation, and while the intimate moment they share is the same, their experiences are as different from one another as the mercs are from each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Locus

Three times you saw him at a distance.

The first was through the scope of your rifle. You caught him, a burst of orange and steel amidst a sea of tan, and you fired. The shot blew the ground to pieces six inches from his foot—his head jerked around to follow its trajectory. He found you through your camouflage. You could see the moment that his HUD recalculated to account for you, seeking out your signal, your signature, because he straightened up and fixated on the exact spot in which you were standing before raising his gun. The shot grazed the outside edge of your calf, left a trailing scuff across your armor. Sent you flickering back into existence. Over _his_ radio, you heard the Feds react. Wonder who and what you were. As you dove behind the nearest cover his voice crackled in your ear, the first use of your private channel on this godforsaken planet.

“Welcome to the party,” he told you. “Took you long enough.”

The second time you saw him he was signaling.  A gesture of his fingers at his side intended only for you. A countdown in silence because he was too busy talking to his adopted men—your victims—to speak to you directly. You detonated the charges as his ticking fingers reached zero, and heard the screams through his radio. The EMP destroyed your own soldiers’ camo, and those that were left of his opened frenzied fire.

“This is getting messy,” you objected.

“That’s the point,” he’d answered.

The third time was a proper battle. He was screaming through your radio, messages to you disguised as orders. The twisted shape of his words and the way they uncoiled in your ear sat heavy in the pit of your stomach, loud in your skull despite the deafening proximity of gunfire. Of shouts. Of dying.

“Meet me,” he grunted at you between rapports of bullets, as you shot him in the foot, “motherfucker.”

He’d sent you the coordinates a moment later. You’d wanted to shoot him again.

You found him at the fueling station seven hours later. He arrived with two of your own men, at your insistence. You came with four. Even in your early exercises in guiding your own troops, you were learning to love the number. 

The station itself was cramped, and cluttered. Tight with racks. It was windowless, as much a bunker as a station; the fitting for a planet ravaged first by the covenant, then its own people, and now by you. Felix dismissed your guard, a trailing procession of black clad pirates with blood on their hands. The weight in your stomach turned into a knot as they left.

Even alone, you weren’t sure what you wanted to say to him. What you could say. It had been too long: Almost a year since you’d seen him.

In a way, you still hadn’t.

“Take your helmet off,” was the first thing you managed to say to him.

“What?”

“Take. Your _helmet_. Off.”

“Jesus _,_ ok. After you, _Locus,_ ” he’d retorted, hissing your name like a whispered song, jabbing at the fact that your armor was your face in every way that mattered. But you complied, nevertheless, removing your artificial face if only so you could ask him to do the same.

“Off,” you ordered him.

“Fine.”

He mumbled other things, too, though you chose to ignore them, as he peeled it away from his face.

A year here had aged him: not in any way that his new companions, the people who saw him every day, might have noticed. But you could see the change in the depressions where the soft curve of his cheeks should be, in the depth of his temples, and in the length of his hair: The broad swatch down the middle that had begun as a regulation buzz-cut before creeping down the back of his skull into something not unlike a mohawk—but too short, too natural, too wide—was longer than you remembered. The front of it lay pasted to his forehead, reaching almost to his eyes, depressed by the helmet. He’d been buzzing the sides of it diligently, but you could still see the shift still in that change of length. It was youthful in a way that didn’t match his actual age. 

You saw change, too, in the way he worried the silver ring at the corner of his lip, chewing on the scar beneath it. You tried to look him in the eyes and found that they’d sunk deeper in his skull. Receding. Darker than usual, with the shadow of his brow across them.

He’d chosen to take the rebels, knowing he’d suit them better. But you could see the way they’d resorted to living etched into his face. You wondered what he saw in yours, what the Feds had done so far, but you didn’t give him the chance to tell you.

Your stomach had turned to rock and ice and you didn’t know what to say. So, when he opened his mouth, you buried it in yours.

You consumed him right there, collapsing to the floor with all your armor on, with his dark hair snagging on your Kevlar fingers. You kissed him with a cracked lip that turned his tongue to copper, the taste of blood returning to you as he slid it along the inside of your teeth. You kissed him until you felt like gunmetal smelting in the bellows of his breathing, and then you greeted him with bruises shaped like your ceramic-plated fingertips. With your teeth sunk into his neck.

“Nice to see you too,” he sputtered, and you bit into his lip.

You don’t remember if, prior to that, you’d ever kissed him quite like you did then. Like you wanted to swallow him. Like you wanted to take everything he was and put it inside of you, instead. It had been so _long._

He tried to work you out of your armor, and you wouldn’t let him. You let him loosen it only, let him slide his hands beneath your chest plate to seek the zipper and straps of Kevlar and underarmor and pull you free of its zipper to the waist and further. You let him free you of cup and holster and every infringement on the parts of you he wanted. Only then did you let him take the chest harness.

You undid his armor, too, and he pulled it off like an afterthought.

 “Fuck,” he muttered, and you let him, your mouth preoccupied with the bare patch of his chest you were exposing, your hands consumed with stripping him from Kevlar, pulling down his zipper. You gave him no choice but to help you extract him from every inch of fabric you could see, making him wholly bare beneath you. he never once objected.

You kissed along the length of where his zipper had been until your lips met more hair than skin, and he swore at you for not going further before you silenced his commentary with your mouth. The two of you had begun to taste like salt, now, as well as copper, and you leaned into the flavor, pressing his bare back to the floor as you did.

You pinned him there, beneath you, enamored with the way he responded to the compression, the choke in his breath between the groans, the pull of his arms around your shoulders your waist your hips and your hair. He tore the tie and set it loose. Later, you would have to braid it to get it back inside your helmet, but you would make him pay you in advance for the effort with heat and sweat and tension and raw edges: with chafes where his skin met your Kevlar.

You would fuck him in a sea of cast off armor, a pool of green and steel and orange, with him exposed and you protected.

He grabbed your hair with both hands to keep it out of your faces, and pulled, _hard,_ the only way you ever liked it, when he decided to move you from his raw lips to his throat, his chest, his shoulder. You left the imprint of your teeth in each. You took him in in mouthfuls. Pressed down in increments before you pulled back, tugged at taught flesh and the muscle underneath until his breath caught and his hips bucked underneath you, bringing other parts of you together that made you pull away and snap your jaw shut a millimeter from his ear.  You clenched your teeth as you reminded yourself how to breathe.

You ground your bodies together at the hip, forcing a shout from his lips. A reflex. His legs snapped up to either side of you, a sudden lateral pressure on your pelvis. His heels knocked against the backs of your legs. The sound of flesh against armor was dull and heavy, as weighty and unruly as the constant roiling feeling in your stomach.

“Jesus, Locs,” he hissed at you. “Take it easy.”

But you _couldn’t_. You pressed your hand into his thigh and pushed the need you had for him up against his greed for you and kissed him as if to suffocate him until he bit into you to make you stop. He held you by your mouth, your lip pinned between his teeth as he lowered a hand between you. Found you and pulled you and stroked you and gathered you against him, somehow fitting his hand around the both of you at once so he could ply you together with alternating slow and sharp motions until you groaned. Until you wanted him to replace his teeth with his lips and kiss you. Drink the oxygen from your lungs. Kiss you until he killed you.

He did let your mouth go, eventually, but not the rest of you, his grip tight and motions furious. You breathed into his shoulder with your hands dug into any part of him you could reach. Gripping him for stability even as he stole it from you with strokes of his hand that left you shaking and groaning despite yourself.

“Miss me?” he asked you when you gasped. And you couldn’t stand to answer.

You didn’t have the words.

So you took him by the hips and tipped him to where you needed him, tearing his hand free of you only for it to go rushing, reaching—Felix had predicted this better than you had—to retrievea nondescript tube from one of his armor’s pockets, ready to ease your way.

You could feel the difference a year makes—the tension—as you slid inside him in increments of millimeters. As you leaned over him and thrust your hips forward with you. Deeper. You put your mouth on every inch of his torso, taking in the sour-salty taste of sweat as you sank inside. He wrapped his legs around you. You liked the weight. Almost as much as you liked the way his spine snapped into an arch that lifted him off the floor and sent his muscled stomach colliding with you as you slipped the rest of the way into him in a headlong rush. A movement that slammed you both together with a soft sound punctuated by his swearing.

“Quiet,” you grunted.

“ _What?”_

You hadn’t come to him for words. That was becoming clearer by the second, by the gasp, as you drove into him again, slow and methodic and forceful with your knees braced against the floor. You pinned his wrists in your hands and his lips with yours. Held him immobile in every way you could think of while you sank into the heat of him, testing how deep you could go, if it was possible to reach his heart. If you could determine if he had one. He cried out against your mouth and you swallowed up the sound.

“I don’t want to talk,” you told him, parting from him long enough for him to groan, the sound high and crackling, on the verge of a whimper, as you pulled back with your hips as well as your mouth.

“Oh, big surprise, Locus—” he began, voice weak and airless, and you slammed yourself into him, ground yourself into his body so hard his voice caught and the end of his words came undone. The whole of him shuddered—inside and out—and you bit into the inside of your cheek to keep from shouting, and slipped a little above him as one of your knees gave out. As he turned you momentarily weak. His legs released your waist and snapped back and away, retreating until his knees hit your elbows. And he stayed there, for a moment, lying coiled underneath you, with his mouth wide but soundless at last, his eyes wide but unfocused.

The moment he could move again, form patterns with his tongue and lips that might turn into words, you pulled out of him entirely.

He tucked his elbows underneath him and shot upright, bringing him chest to chest with you, heartbeat to heartbeat. He opened his mouth to speak, and snarled at you instead.

You sat there counting seconds as he faced off with you at almost kissing distance, teeth clenched and jaw rigid. His hair stood up at the back of his head, mussed by the floor and the rhythm you set against it. You wanted to put your hands through it. To explore its newfound length with your fingers. But that would suggest something, speak to something, you weren’t sure yet that you wanted to say.

He looked at you with a grimace, seething at you even as his legs wrapped again around your back. The heaving rise and fall of his chest against yours came to feel even more desperate, somehow, as it slowed.

He forced air and a grunt from between his teeth right before he ducked his head sideways and brought incisors to your earlobe, hard, a bittersweet flash of pain. You could feel his surrender in the gesture: _Fine._

“Better,” you said.

As he progressed to tracing the arch of your ear with the wet-hot tip of his tongue, you wrapped your arms around him, and pressed him back into the floor.

He landed in the cradle of your hands, one at his waist, thumb pressed into ridges of his spine, your elbow folded against the tapering pattern of muscle over of his hip, the other at the back of his neck, thumb free to seek the damp blackness of his hair without giving you away as you laid him down across your arm. You set your tongue against his neck to sample his frantic pulse, imagining that you could taste the difference when it quickened, taste the moment that he reached down, forcing his hands through the narrow skin-warm space between you, to guide you back inside him.  Back to the clench of his body and the feeling that he could empty you in an instant if you’d let him, the shape of him too well matched to the length and breadth of you for you to stand it. He had more control over you, through that alone, than you wanted him to know.

You bit into his shoulder to brace yourself before you began to move. Stifled the sound that escaped from you, like biting a bullet before an amputation, though who was taking what from whom wasn’t clear to you as you made your way into him in ever-quicker increments.

You kept the rhythm steady, at first, even and more merciful. You were patient, your arms still underneath him, fucking him into the crook of your elbow while his head fell back, heavy in your hand; and the weight of him drove you faster. Made you forceful again. You had to pull your mouth from the pattern of purple circles and teeth marks you were leaving on his neck for a moment as you extracted your arms so that you could brace yourself even as you took hold of his wrists again, holding him down along with you, forcing him to translate his responses, his reactions, into movements only of head and hips and arching spine as you first changed pace, and then lost control of it.

You succumbed to need with three rapid, reflexive motions of your hips, like a stutter, your body escaping your instruction, followed by a pause as you recovered yourself.  Steeled yourself. As you bottomed out inside of him with a heavy and pointed forward thrust he might have broken his silence to beg for had you not just punched the air from his lungs.

You liked the look of him, suffocating, so you did it again. A hard and sudden motion that made him buckle beneath you, lift his head only to slam it down again, writhing in response to you. Each time he moved he seemed to fall, just a little more to pieces, releasing ever louder sounds. Cracking, wordless exclamations somewhere between euphoria and agony. You just wanted to make him scream.

You snapped your hips forward with the weight of your body behind them, pushing with your knees against the floor. Motions meant to punish. To punch holes through his quaking soul.

His body pitched against yours.

You lessened your intensity solely to keep him breathing, keep him conscious. You liked him on the brink of blacking out, but only just, a mess of gasping and choking and groaning escaping between heaving inhalations. You had to clamp your hands around his wrists to steady yourself. Fixate on the inverted pattern of his tattoos, his blackout arms that made even your skin look light by comparison, their geometric designs formed by the places where untouched flesh poked through a wall of ink.

He made you shudder, and you traced his breastbone with your tongue and put your teeth around his clavicle before bringing yourself back up to his mouth.

You kissed him in an effort to devour him, swallowing the loudness of the instances when he dropped his head to the floor and did nothing but gasp for moments at a time while you moved in him.

You brushed your lips across his throat when he took his mouth away, following the trajectory you’d so often watched him employ with his knife, side to side, and followed it with a second motion up and down, chasing the ridges of his windpipe as you worked your way up to planting kisses along the underside of his chin, the edge of his jaw. You leaned forward to reach him, changing the angle of your hips as you went, and fucked him directly into the floor while your lips left the tender shadows of kisses on his chest. You drove the both of you down, and down, through the core of the planet until he thrashed beneath you and crushed your waist between his thighs, begging you in silence with a bitten lip—his piercing caught under the white of his teeth—to both keep going, and to stop.

You compromised by rearranging. By realigning him beneath you, leaning back and digging your fingers into his hips, his ribcage, until he moved with you the way you wanted, and then resettled yourself above him, settling back with your hands and arms planted closer to his waist now than his shoulder. A position a little elevated from his body, a little distant from his sighing mouth, which was a price worth paying for a vantage point from which you could brutalize him in the ways he liked best. An angle from which you could strike at the core of him, and the spot—a few inches in—that you remembered would bring his back up off the floor and the volume from his voice.

You left his hands free to seek himself while you paused. His knuckles brushed the sensitive skin below your navel, sending a shiver through you that captured his attention, brought his fingertips fluttering up to your stomach to trace the lines of scares and musculature, scraping and pressing and pinching as he crossed your chest. In that moment of recess you became conscious of the roar of your own breathing. The sweat beading on your brow. Of the way Felix looked to you, ruined to the point of beauty, with his hair sticking to his forehead, his head lolling on the floor. He followed the shapes of you with eyes that you could feel, with a shaking in his hands. Breathing with his entire torso, the effort visibly lifting his ribcage and flexing the hard muscle of his abdomen, his left mouth half open to reach for air he was starving for. It looked to you like an invitation for your tongue. He dug his nails into your shoulders.

You resumed at an unforgiving pace.

He broke away from your mouth within moments, casting his head back, open-jawed, breathing in with a sharp, high sound and exhaling with a whine like a stifled shout, the rhythm of the sound punctuated by the forward and upward slam of your hips. His back rose off the floor, and he clutched at your shoulders your biceps the back of your neck with a clawing, anxious want, and a hint of desperation. You pressed a kiss against his breastbone and he tore into your hair, knotting his hands in the helmet-mussed length of it. He clutched you by your scalp so hard he could have torn your hair out of it completely if he’d wanted to, and the pleasure-pain drove you faster into the heat of him. Pulled you far too close to the edge of spilling over, so that you froze only minutes into your frenzy to wait for him. Felix cried out as if you’d wounded him.

“Jesus _Christ_ , Locs,” he managed between gasps, something wet and weak at the edges of his voice, “what are you doing? Finish what you fucking started—”

You bit into him again as you punched through him with your hips, and his voice evaporated into something wordless and weightless and _loud_ and you collapsed into a rhythm you could no longer control, reaching striving aching for that electric point inside him and how it felt, tight in your chest, as it slipped across the tip of you to the tune of him choking on a moan, a grunt, a yelp before even that lapsed into silence. A scream without sound painted over his expression, upper lip peeling back from his teeth as if to let him puncture and consume the very air. There was a flush taking over his cheeks his neck his forehead, a red silhouette of his face you caught glimpses of as his head lolled and you struggled to catch his open mouth. You couldn’t. Not by kissing him.

You tried and he seemed to want to answer but he couldn’t keep his mouth shut and so you sank your teeth down into his lower lip and held him by that as he voiced his wordless screams and trembled, tasting every second like blood and sweat and expectation. His piercing snagged against the back of your teeth to the rhythm of _you_ , into him, into him, until with a wet hot rush you unraveled; a steady kind of bursting born of having gone too long without him.

For a split second you thought you’d slipped free of consciousness altogether. Slid into a comforting silent dark broken only by the occasional distant echo of your breathing, of a groan, a sound like dying that you only recognized as having come from you once you’d opened your eyes again and found yourself buried in his neck with the cry fading from you throat. His hands were still in your hair, his weak breathing in your ear.

He tried to speak again, a minute later, once he recovered the oxygen he’d lost to you. You yanked his head around to face you with your hand against the soft-sleek texture of his hair, your cheek still resting against his shoulder, and kissed him long and soft and desperate before he could. You had to: If you’d let him talk again, he would have known. Would have seen through to the fact that you couldn’t have answered in that moment if you’d tried.

Three times you saw him at a distance, and when you had him close again, you found yourself drowning in the hollowness of having nothing that your mouth would say.


	2. Felix

 

The motherfucker greeted you by shooting you.

Well, shooting near you. Six inches from your right foot. You’d known he’d reached Chorus already, and that he’d bunkered down with the Feds over the course of the last two weeks, but he’d told you exactly nothing about when he’d make his appearance for you. The terseness typical of the written communication you’d relied on for nearly a year had carried over to Chorus, and you weren’t happy about it. Or about the ground bursting next to you, spattering clods of dirt across your armor. You really couldn’t be certain in that moment whether you were more pissed off or gratified by the blinking arrival of a new dot on your HUD. Its distance placed him on a rise thirty yards away, and though you couldn’t see him, you knew where he was. You would have even without the HUD. You could feel him.

He had too much elevation on you for you to return the favor, so you shot him in the leg. It glanced off of his armor but melted his camo away with a liquid shimmer that captured the attention of your troops. You felt his eyes on you as he made for cover, and imagined something like a scowl moving across his lips to compliment your grin. It had been so long since you’d _seen_ him. You liked the shape of his silhouette on the horizon as it dove for cover from what you’d done.

“Welcome to the party,” you told him as he disappeared from view. “Took you long enough.”

His answer marked the first time you’d heard his unrecorded voice in four months, but he didn’t do you the service of making it interesting.

“This is precisely the timetable we planned for.”

“Locs? Not the joke.”

You waited for his retort with a laugh already swelling in your mouth, but you didn’t get one, and your smile fell from your face. You had expected him to correct himself. But he didn’t. You expected him to inform you that he’d be ignoring that, but he didn’t. He answered you with complete and total broken-radio-worthy silence, and you didn’t know what to do with it.

_Whatthe fuck?_

You prodded him with words over the sound of the emergent firefight, looking to expel _something_ from him, even dismissal, even just a grunt—any kind of acknowledgement—with no better luck.

“And here I was hoping you’d grow a sense of humor while I was gone.”

The next and last thing he said to you was a ~~three sentence~~ breakdown of weaknesses in Federal strategy, delivered in a rush, a deluge of information that was more convenient than essential—solely for your benefit. ~~But~~ before you could demand more, the battle pulled you apart.

In the scattered aftermath and flustered debrief your general would have to shout at you, twice, for grinding your teeth over the radio.

And your next conversation went like that, too _._

“Did you forget how to talk, or something?” you snapped at Locus, at one point, so loud that the soldier beside you heard the muffled sound from inside your helmet and turned to stare at you in the final moments before Locus’ bullet found his skull. _That_ had earned you a verbal answer: “ _Watch it.”_ A warning to shut your mouth and an order to get down. That was all you got.

“What is your _problem_?”

You pressed him at intervals until at last, exasperated, he snarled through your radio. “I’m under _fire,_ Felix.”

You knew he was. One of the shots was yours. A shot like you _meant it_. Square in the chest, stripping him of his camo, knocking him backwards. You heard the grunt and the wheeze of his over your radio. You wanted to take his emptied throat and cram the words down it yourself.

You’d forgotten how fast he could move, how quickly he could recover when pressed. Locus fought like a tank, heavy and hard hitting and absolute, but he sometimes moved like he didn’t know or care how big he was. Short bursts of unforgiving speed focused entirely on his weapon of the hour which was—unfortunately for you—his sniper rifle. That time, he didn’t miss your foot.

“Meet me, motherfucker,” you snarled at him through your radio as you stumbled. You could have gutted him for the empty static that answered.

You should have demanded some confirmation that he heard you, but you were busy gritting your teeth against the bone deep bruise already forming at the base of your ankle—like a brand in Locus’ colors—and the best you could manage was to spit the coordinates of the most isolated place you knew over your radio before you lined up another shot.

Which you missed.

But you did find him waiting for you, later, at the right coordinates at the right time. Behaving, despite all the rage he’d caused you.

You led him into the gas station—a ramshackle place with old products lining its shelves and creaking spinning display racks narrowing what little space there was—and sent your men back out. You cornered Locus—or, _maybe_ , he corned you _—_ in front of the counter. It was a _solid_ counter, a remnant of a war-torn planet that could have doubled as a bomb shelter, and you forgot your frustration only long enough to note how much you’d like it if he fucked you on it. Which was not, exactly, what he did.

Your mouth was open to lay into him when he finally, _finally,_ spoke, but where you would have liked an explanation, he gave you an order.

“Take your helmet off.”

_You’ve got to be kidding me._

“ _What_?”

He repeated himself in unyielding staccato. Weird words, with an uncertain intonation caught somewhere between strained and dangerous. It made your heart race, turned the sound of your pulse up to a roar in your ears.

“Take. Your _helmet_. Off.”

You had to swallow before you could speak, but the words came out sharp and airy—the way you liked them—once you did.

“Jesus _, ok_. After you, Locus _.”_

You threw his name at him. You weren’t sure if it had the intended effect of reminding him which of youwas the lunatic who used his helmet as a face: He was too stiff and too quiet. He gave you nothing you could read, and it made hiscompliance as unsavory as his silence.

The face beneath the helmet, when he removed it, was exactly what you remembered. A bit more stubble, maybe. But that was it. The rest of him was as he’d always been: a complexion too rich, too smooth, for his lifestyle. Skin so deep brown and _warm_ that you could forget the fact that he never let an inch of it see the sun. He’d have to take his armor off for that.

He looked at you with the same blank and blinded eyes you remember learning how to read. They were, beneath their surfaces, more nanocircuitry and micro-spectrometer than tissue. Most of _that_ had been burned out or boiled by the same injury responsible for painting the discolored scar that fanned across his face from cheekbone to brow. All told, the only two disappointments you discovered in looking at him were his hair—which he’d cropped shorter than you liked it, into a hacked-off ponytail that you estimated, once released, would only kiss his shoulders—and his demeanor. Locus was stony on the best of days, but something about him now was more reminiscent of metal.

He gave you about three seconds to take him in before he demanded your helmet again.

“Off.”

“ _Fine_.”

You snapped the word as you unsnapped seals, and tossed the helmet aside, to the counter you hoped to later push it off. Or had hoped to, before Locus’s expression sent anger and acid crawling up your throat.

_What is wrong with you?_

You kept thinking that. Really, it was the wrong question. _Why won’t you fucking talk to me_ sounded better in your head, and it was that you finally chose topush out onto the end of your tongue, and it was that which Locus swallowed.

He was on you before you could register that he had moved, that rare moment of speed again, directed, in all its fury, not at his rifle, but at you.

He kissed you with all his weight and energy behind it, with his fingers dug in between your shoulder guards and your arms, then yanked you up to him by your armor so that he could scald your mouth with his. The collision bruised your lips, the whole exchange as brutal and heavy-handed and spectacular as you remembered, and then some. Like the way he fought.He kissed you right into the floor: One second, you were craning your neck to reach him, the next his armored arms had moved with a sequence of clicks and thuds to wrap around your waist and he was leaning into you, pushing you into the crooks of his folded elbows and his waiting, hungry palms.

You put your hands around the back of his head—ruining and loosening his hair—and pulled him into your mouth. You were thrilled to rediscover, as you did, that the inside of Locus tasted like the dull, sour copper of a split lip just waiting to reopen, and like some body-taste with no comparison. Locus-taste. The flavor he’d leave behind to fuck with you later, when you were working over your piercing with your tongue and felt the sudden urge to lick your lips.

He braced one hand against the counter as he brought himself to his knees and you came down on top of him, hard. You’d have been content to stay there, straddling his legs, but he pushed you off and you dropped on your back on the floor instead, and he spread out above you with his starving lips to follow.

This wasn’t the explanation you’d wanted, the way he locked his teeth into your neck.

But you thought you that you could live with it.

You couldn’t get his armor off fast enough, once you’d decided that. You managed to peel the Kevlar off of him only after having to fight him in silence, suffocating under his mouth with his teeth in your lip, for the removal of his chestpiece.  He let you push the material away for as far you could reach, until it hung up on the armor still strapped to his legs.

Locus had a body like steel. Hard, _heavy_ muscle was all he was made of, and it whispered beneath his skin in the shapes your fingers remembered. Your tongue. You wanted to lick along the trough above his breastbone, to take a bite out of his chest: he tried to take another one out of your neck. It pinched, and promised a bruise. A marker from the Locus you _knew_. About damned time, too: as you slackened under his hands, as they moved across your armor, it occurred to you that this was the most relaxed you’d been in weeks. And that was with the tension in your shoulders still lifting you off the floor.

You were so much better at getting your clothes off than he was. So much more willing, more comfortable in your own, physical skin, while he treated his like an afterthought, a second, unnecessary layer beneath the armor he’d rather exist in. You could have laughed at him, at the Kevlar and ceramic caught on him like thigh-highs, if you weren’t so busy first with undressing, and then with trying to find two cocks at once with your hand.

Locus was easier to take apart than he liked to believe: his breath caught when your fingers closed, and the shudder your grip sent through him arched his spine and strained his shoulders and took the messy, endless insistence of his kiss away, replacing it with sudden, reluctant pliancy. He offered his lips as if prepared to let you swallow his soul through the part in them, and you bit right in.

His cracked lip was bleeding again. You didn’t mind the taste, though, as an exchange for his increasingly ragged breathing and his fingers digging bruises into your hip. You even liked it. When his mouth was free of yours, the flavor on your teeth was enough to tide you over while you let him break away to gasp. It was almost a choke, muffled against your skin where he’d come to rest his head. His breath was hot on your neck, and you tried to provoke another sound effect from him—with rapid strokes of your hand that made your own eyes roll in your head—if only to prove that you could. And you did. Reluctant noise from between his teeth all raw and baritone and weak. You waited until he was done groaning to speak.

“Miss me?” you panted as you let go of him, and he lifted his head from your shoulder to give you some inscrutable white-eyed look.

_Go ahead, say no._

You knew that he did, as he planted his free hand on your other hip, holding hard and mean with his fingernails digging through to your bones. Like a promise. You scrambled to accept it, searching your cast-off armor for the little silver tube you’d come here with. You’d known he’d do this, if not that it would be so . . . _Locus._ And _weird_ Locus, at that, though the sex promised to be good enough. Fucking him on the filthy floor had a certain appeal of its own, and you liked the spice of his pitiable, inarguable brand of crazy too much to argue with it. You liked the haphazardness of his hurry and the lack of finesse—as he sought the best angle into you—that told you he was out of practice.

He slipped inside you with both hesitation and the usual care. Little by little, plying you apart slowly while you breathed around the shape of him. You noticed as you did that he smelled good—in a stale Kevlar, battlefield sort of way. Like sweat, and the antiseptic the armor would send to counter it on those missions when you couldn’t take it off—at least, not all the way off—for days, or months. (Or years, if the UNSC had its way.)

He bent over you and kissed you as he went, his dark hair tickling your chest, your neck, as it fell around his face, and you thought about pulling it back with your fingers the way you had when he’d first started kissing you. You knew he liked it when you pulled on it. You knew _you_ liked the way he grimaced as if he didn’t. Your knuckles were already against his temples with slow-unfolding fingers, your legs hooked together at the ankle against the back of his muscled thighs, when he forgot how to be patient.

You, unlike Locus, were not out of practice. But no one fucked you quite like Locus did—and when he went from _sliding_ to _slamming_ into you, you saw a bright white burst of pain and lost your tentative grip on his hair. Which, really, was an unfortunate loss of leverage, since you’d have loved nothing better than to make him do it again.

“Mother _fucker,_ ” you snarled, wondering if he could make out your lust through your anger. He answered you with a growl that rumbled straight through his chest and into your heart.

“ _Quiet.”_

_Watch your tone, asshole . . ._

“What?”

You didn’t mind how incredulous you sounded, though the way the word broke as he began a backward slide, a windup for his next assault on you that tasted like anticipation, wasn’t _entirely_ what you’d been going for.

His next thrust knocked the breath out of you.

_Definitely . . . Missed me._

He pinned your wrists against the floor, swallowing them in his enormous, callous-rough hands, and kissed you again like he meant to inhale you. Or feed himself to you. Punched through your body so hard your back arched off the floor and you actually couldn’t have talked if you’d tried, thanks to the noise you were making against his steely, bleeding lips. He’d always claimed he could taste your piercing, but it was you that was tasting metal as you yelped.

 _Missed the_ fuck _out of me._

“I don’t want to talk,” he rumbled.

_I noticed._

You wished he hadn’t reminded you, wondered why he’d had to open his needy mouth.

“Oh, big surprise,” you panted as he pulled away from you, nearly all the way, promising something nasty you told yourself you were prepared for, “Locus—”

You were _not_ prepared.

He swung his hips with enough force that you suspected he might be trying to break your pelvis. And it hit you _just_ so: so that a wave of sensation so vicious you _almost_ couldn’t call it pleasure rolled through your insides, so that your body locked up, so that your mouth fell open with your sentence unfinished, so you shouted as you tensed, so that your knees knocked against his arms because you’d drawn them so far in as he tore through you. You could have sworn he was doing it on purpose.

 _Oh,_ Locus, _come on: not the melodrama._

You couldn’t make those words—or any of their hundreds of more nuanced and more palatable variations—fit in your mouth, as approximately half of your nervous system had stopped responding courtesy of what he was doing to you. But you thought them. You thought streams and rivers and oceans of words—little ways to knock him down off of whatever pedestal living so long in his own self-satisfied, habitual silence had put him on—that wouldn’t also take the fun out of him.

But he was being too _weird_ , still, for you to get the jump on him. That wretched, infuriating Locus-weird, past the point of what even you could deal with. Even opening your mouth to _try_ to speak was enough to set him off: he pulled out of you, and sat back on his armored heels, taking a little of your good sense with him as he went. Might as well have taken your fucking oxygen.

You snapped upright, planting your feet on the floor behind him, the insides of your knees still pinched against his hips, forming a paler, warmer frame around his body that highlighted the V shaped seam where his hips met his torso, that drew your eye to the evidence that none of your comments had actually lessened his arousal in any way, shape, or form. You tried to evaluate his eyes as much as his erection, though you found them just as inscrutable, and contemplated—as you snarled at him in requisite quiet—whether things would go better or worse for you if you put your hands on his throat, threw him to the floor, and silenced him in turn. Whether he’d fight you if you choked him and jerked him all at once, or if that would be enough to demolish the cold indifference on his face. Wondered if the way he’d clutch at you—pulling at your hands and hanging off your wrists while he moaned through a closing throat while you leaned over him and told him “ _quiet”—_ would be worth trading in for letting him fuck you.

You wondered, too, what else he had left that he could hold over you, that he could even do to you, if you did keep talking: He could, in theory, try to leave, but you’d have him back before he could get his armor on. Maybe even get him to the countertop while you were at it. And he could also, you supposed, choke _you_ half to death with his cock down your throat, but you’d always liked the taste of him, anyway.

You could have happily descended on him even without his asking. Gone quiet on your own terms while you took him apart with your mouth. But you didn’t. You snarled at him without a word instead, snaked your legs around him, and moved close enough to kiss him, seething, so he’d know how little you approved. Your cheek brushed his, smooth skin against the prickle of stubble, as you bit down on his earlobe.

  _Listen to this, you lunatic._

Locus wrapped his arms around you before he pushed you back onto the floor.

He kissed you with his fingers tangled, _entrenched_  in your hair while you sought him out, left bruises on your neck in the shape of his teeth and licked along your jugular in the pattern of your pulse as you guided him back. You were tighter the second time he pushed inside of you, only a little ready, and a little raw, but he was lube-slick and long and he _eased_ through you all the same. You let your head drop into his hand and tried not to sigh as he fucked you—gentle and boring—into his arms.

Not that gentle lasted long. You had him, now, between your silence and the salt taste your neck must have been leaving on his bloody tongue. He was yours. And he was starving. And you weren’t about to keep him from his feed. ~~~~

He had to take his arms out from under you to achieve an angle and speed that would satiate him, though he didn’t take much of his weight with them. Locus was heavy and he knew it, and he ground your skeletons together as much at the ribs as the pelvis, pinning you down by your chest at the same time that he grabbed your wrists again. He snapped his hips into you fast and erratic while you struggled to breathe past his weight and his mouth. You didn’t try to push him off. It didn’t even occur to you. All _you_ were thinking was “ _fuck—”_ and “ _faster,”_ which is exactly what he gave you, without your having to say a word.

The floor chafed at your back, leaving scrapes in the pattern of Locus, and you bucked your hips beneath him as much because you wanted to as because you had to, just as you had to tighten the circlet of your legs around his waist to withstand the pace. And then he surpassed himself: just when you thought you might be close, that you’d hit your own delicious internal rhythm as he suffocated you, he punched into you as deep as he could reach.  Sharp as percussion.

You stopped kissing him, for a moment, because you were screaming in reverse.

_Jesus—_

And then he did it again.

You wanted to claw at his shoulders. You wanted to tear at his hair. But he had your wrists in his shackle grip and all you were able to do was writhe. You might have kissed him, bitten into him, if your head weren’t lolling and your mouth weren’t full of noise.

_Fucking—_

Locus marked you while you squirmed, brutalizing you inside as well as out, leaving the shadows of his teeth on you; he licked a line up your breastbone before biting into your shoulder. Nipped and pulled so that it felt like he was drawing some final reserve of energy out of you through your skin, tearing your consciousness and common sense apart between the sensation of his teeth and the impact of his cock—you couldn’t even _breathe_. He was too deep. Reaching too close to your lungs. Scrambling your organs. Brushing up against your spine to fill every inch you had to fill, leaving no room for air. He pushed what breath you still had right out of you in the form of groans and grunts and cries that sounded as much pleasured as victimized. You loved the soundtrack.

_Christ . . ._

You could have let him keep at it that way until the two of you lost definition and became one ugly, hungry being blended together by your heartstrings, but it would have ruined the fun. And it was too much—too much feeling, too much noise. Cacophonous, and not just because of you. Locus breathed like bellows, and grunted through his teeth. Like an animal.

You never commented on _how_ loud he was: you weren’t certain that he even knew. It wasn’t as if you, personally, even minded, but pointing it out would be exactly the kind of crap that dismantled him. You were keeping it in reserve. For some later, less aggressive date.

The next time Locus kissed your lips you bit him. It was enough to make him slow.

He leaned away from you, studied you. And you lay under him with your eyes closed, remembering what oxygen was.

_You son of a bitch._

He adjusted you as he liked while you panted. Moved you with unforgiving fingers, arranged you over a reprieve of seconds or minutes or you didn’t know how long. You needed it. The stop. But you were high, underneath the overload, and you hated it, too; hated the pause and the thought of losing ground. So you reached for yourself while he worked you over and in the course of your pumping made him tremble.

You opened your eyes and found him still watching you. Looking at you with something in his face you couldn’t name but would have liked to carve up and lift away and keep forever, just that way, just as he was in that moment with his hair falling forward across the high sharp outcrops of his cheekbones, sticking, sweat-drenched, to his temples. He looked debauched. Even as he hovered over you in your writhing, wordless state, he seemed to you like _he’d_ come undone beneath the surface. Seemed to you like _himself._ The prodigal mercenary come home at last. Your hand brushed his stomach, skirting a scar, and you saw him crack a little at the edges as he shivered. As his jaw tightened and his temples popped under his hair.

You ran your palms up his body. Over the ups and downs of muscle and the rise and fall of his roaring breathing as it swelled behind his ribs and lower. _Perfect little soldier._ Always breathing from the diaphragm. You liked to think he was swallowing the taste of your tongue on every inhale. And you believed you could feel the rhythm of that breath inside you as you traced the familiar shapes of his torso and watched him tense beneath your hands.

 _Definitely missed me,_ you decided as you gripped his shoulders. He bent over you to kiss you, to consume you, as he started to move again.

There were so many advantages to fucking a marksman: He knew his targets. He remembered you. His body remembered exactly where to hit, and you swelled and rose on the waves of what it _did_ to you, shaking like an earthquake.

 _Motherfucker—_ He was going to finish you both like this. And it was for the best, really, as he drove into the heart of you faster and faster and faster, that he wouldn’t let you talk. The bullshit you’d have been spewing otherwise— _holy shit, holy fucking shit,_ Locus—as he reduced your entire body to a single pressure point that put heat in your chest and your cock and your cheeks as it radiated through your body and leapt between your neurons, _Oh my god—_

The things you would have been screaming, at the top of your fucking lungs in the moments when he wasn’t knocking the breath out you, _Oh my god,_ _I think I love you—_

It would have been a mess.

For a single second you were afraid you’d said it out loud nonetheless, because he stopped. Froze inside you with agony on his face that didn’t even come close to what he was inflicting on you. Locus stilled, and you shouted as if he’d torn your heart out: that was about how your disappointment felt. How desperate your need was. You could have _murdered_ him. Although you sounded more—you thought—like you might beg him. It wasn’t a tone you were sure you liked.

“Jesus _Christ_ , Locs, what are you doing?” you gasped, hating the keening in your voice. “Finish what you fucking started—”

It occurred to you that he might have meant it as a courtesy only after he slammed through you again. Your comment marked the end of his control. The end of your voice. You were shouting, but all you heard was silence and Locus fighting his body just to breathe.

You held onto him by his hair, tangled wet and lovely between your fingers, so that you could pull at least a piece of _him_ apart as he undid you, inch by inch and breath by breath and thrust by thrust, his teeth hung up on your gasping ragged mouth as he drove into you, biting down on your lip as if to hold you near him while your eyes rolled away in your skull and your body shuddered so hard it took him with you, and he exhausted himself—uncharacteristically vocal—inside you. Cried out as he spilled. He buckled across your body with his hips stuttering like a reflex, and all but fainted against your chest. A weakened heap of salted, sweating flesh with a heartbeat so strong it reverberated through your ribcage to fuck with the rhythm with yours.

The wave you’d been riding broke as he came down, and, when it did, you were every bit as loud as he was.

He didn’t ask you to be quiet.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If Felix's memories seem inconsistent with Locus' chapter, it's no accident.


	3. Together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, now that this thing is all nice and neat and complete, it seems like as good a time as any to mention (since I definitely forgot to do so earlier) that this fic is technically an expanded version of a flashback from chapter 5 of "In the Aftermath of Freedom." Neither fic is required reading for the other, as you can see, but if you're at all curious about the context this monster originally sprang from, that's where you can find it.   
> (The link for that is here for anyone who wants it: http://archiveofourown.org/works/4779839/chapters/10934312 .)

Locus kissed you again before you could catch your breath.

_Seriously, what is with you?_

It wasn’t the worst thing—you liked the doubly salty flavor of his bleeding mouth and the sheen of sweat that was everywhere on him, that was pasting his hair to his cheek—but it was still _weird._ Calculated. Almost like—

He peeled his weight off of your body, finally alert enough to pull out of you while he was at it. He wrapped a hand around your calf and tossed it across his knees so that your legs were back together. Or, at least, so they were on one side of him. His hands moved to his impromptu Kevlar garters, back to business, back to boring, back to clothes even as you weighed the likelihood of being able—granted time—to take it all over again and go round two on the counter top after all. You knew you’d have to have him back here at some other point if you couldn’t: it was just too tempting. It was so _solid_ , and you wanted to know if you could get him to break it. Scuff it, at the very least. Which wouldn’t be the hardest thing to do if fucking you in his armor was going to become a _thing_ for him.

You hoped not. You liked him naked, all that weighty muscle moving where you could see it. Much more than you liked the look on his face, now. His cloudy and colorless eyes were hard to track, but you were certain he wasn’t looking at you. That he was lost in the floor to your left. And worse, the set of his jaw looked tighter than a padlock, all determined and stubborn and almost  _professional_  in that forced, obnoxious way he had when he’d decided to deny you something. Whatever it was. And that he could fuck you like that, and then look like this—

_No,_ you decided. _Not happening._

_

 

“Hey,” you ignored Felix. “Locus— _hey._ ”

Or you tried to.

His voice, at once easy and earnest, had a gravity well of its own; and you fell into it despite yourself. You’d meant to stand, to dress. Instead you paused beside him and resisted the urge to trace the dark silhouette of the tattoo running from his ankle to outer thigh. To follow its sharp, geometric outline with your palm. Felix propped himself up on one arm so that his hand could reach your face.

He dragged his fingertips down your lips, and stretched them out to trace your jaw with a touch so light it tickled, that made you long to bolt. He framed your face with soft motions. Studied patterns of stubble and the shape of your bones. Closed his hand under your chin and pulled you towards him, falling back to the floor as he did. You fell with him.

You settled almost sideways on the ground, your torso twisted to let you rest against his chest. He held your face and kissed you softly while you absorbed his heartbeat. Its rhythm ached and resonated inside you.

You wanted to pull back. You wanted to stay forever. You _wanted,_ now, to say something, but couldn’t make the words come. You didn’t know what they were. Or how to say them. And Felix kissed you as if he didn’t care. As if it didn’t matter, as if he'd found the key to what was wrong with you and was happy to wait you out. Which didn’t make any sense. How could he know where your words were, when all you could be sure of was that trying to speak them hurt? You lie across him in desperate silence and let him plant small, tender kisses against your compliant lips between longer exchanges in which he drank you like water in the desert, slowly—conscious of the risks of drowning dehydration—but intently. Taking too much while you gave him all you could.

You let him have you in hopes that he’d take the sour, heavy emptiness in your chest, too. An awful feeling like someone had hollowed out your abdomen up to your breastbone.

Maybe you’d done it to yourself.

Maybe you'd clawed away everything else, emptied yourself out, trying to reach up under your rib-cage to relieve the horrible pressure of your heart swelling shut and slowly choking. You wanted him to hold you, to keep his palms against your back, until it either deflated again, or stopped.

But his closeness almost made it worse. Made it agonizing. And you couldn't conceive of _why_. What feeling, what sequence of emotions could account for pain in the aftermath of pleasure and longing that only worsened as he held you. Would explain both the closing of your throat and the shaking relief of knowing you still had him, that he was close again—

That he still wanted you.

 

_

 

Locus came back around when you kissed him, like he always did, and the shoulders you’d been tensing again went slack beneath you as he pasted you across the floor. His pliant response delighted you, and—better yet—he stayed more or less on top of you even after you released his mouth; trying so hard to make himself smaller than you as he curled up with his knees dug into your thigh and his face hidden in your neck. You threw an arm around his shoulders and stared up at the lightless ceiling, tired-sighing before you spoke.

“So can I talk, now?”

His answer was his breath against your collarbone, and his hand over your heart. You patted the back of it with yours.

“I’m going to take that as a yes.”

 

_

 

It occurred to you that there might be a name for your alternating emptiness, bursting, yearning, emptiness as you breathed heat off his neck. You weren't listening to him—you could predict which of his incessant chatter was relevant and which of it wasn't before it even left his mouth, and knew he hadn't alighted yet on anything important—but you were thinking, nevertheless, in the airy rhythms of his voice when a _knowing_  fell over you. A memory of a word you'd heard, and never trusted. You didn't trust it now. But you rolled it around in your brain anyway and tried to imagine it on your tongue, and you thought you liked the way it tasted in the brief seconds before it went sour.

 

_

Locus clung to you with his face tucked against your neck, warm gusts breezing across your throat every time he exhaled. He was trying to be steady that breathing: He failed. How hard he was trying only made his shaking more obvious, and the performance wasn’t lost on you. But you liked it. Liked him weakening against you. Liked how he’d fallen into you instead of running away, this time, and how his silence was no longer meant to fight you. You wondered if it ever was: what the odds were that he’d just gotten that much worse at talking in your absence.

If that was the case, you almost pitied the Federal Army. Almost.

More important to you was the fact that he was finally back to himself. He’d come back to _you,_ and you really couldn’t care less about anything else.

 

_

 

_I . . ._

You knew what you wanted to say, and you knew you could never tell him.

 

 


End file.
